Raising hell about sounding the alarm

Stories about global warming, including my own, have sounded increasingly alarmed in recent months. That’s partly because the November election ripped the duct tape off the mouths of government scientists gagged by the Bush Administration, partly because other scientists have upped estimates of the speed and ferocity of the atmosphere’s wrath, and partly because evidence is popping up everywhere.
Last week, our attention was pulled back to earth by the story of a wave of extinctions, which may or may not relate to global warming, sweeping across the planet’s surface. No sooner had I posted a link to that story than I turned back to the news and read:
85 percent of ocean reefs have disappeared, and shellfish are going fast (New Scientist)
Tasmanian devils, delta smelt, green sturgeon, salmon, and whitebark pine trees are vanishing (various)
The permafrost is thawing—and releasing methane (Reuters)
Floodwaters are swamping Australia (Reuters)
Sand dunes are swallowing Brazil (Reuters)
That was enough for one afternoon. Not only are glaciers melting and hurricanes swirling, but avalanches of apocalyptic news stories pelt our heads daily. As someone who puts such stories before the public eye, I wonder how much the eye can take without going blind.
Chicken Little Crying Wolf
The late Joseph M. Williams, a scholar of argument, taught that people respond most to an expression of costs:
We fear a loss more than we are attracted to a gain, even when they are objectively identical. For example, the effect of a hole in the ozone is the same, whether we say its solution might save 10,000 lives or leaving it unsolved might cost 10,000 deaths. But we tend to react more keenly to the risk of 10,000 dead than to the chance of saving an equal number of lives.”
His example, written when the ozone hole was a bigger worry than the whole atmosphere, seems quaint now. Instead of 10,000 lives, several billion are at risk, just counting our species, or as Williams would put it, the cost is greater.
But this issue has a timing problem. Anecdotes about Chicken Little and the boy who cried wolf come to mind, but neither apply, because the sky really is falling, and there really is a wolf. It’s just that the sky is falling steadily over the next 50 to 100 years, and the wolf is behind those mountains.
We’re asking people to act now to prevent damage that will become obvious when it’s too late to act. And we’re asking it of a divided public. Last week, a Yale study revealed that 51 percent of Americans are alarmed or concerned about global warming, and the rest are not so sure. We have to wake up the 49 percent without making the 51 percent feel hopeless.
That cause is not aided by headlines like this one in yesterday’s Guardian UK: “As the planet faces the most dangerous century in its 4.5bn-year history, astronomer royal Martin Rees looks into his crystal ball.” This is undoubtedly a very dangerous century for humanity, which has been messing around on this planet for 200,000 years. Isn’t that bad enough without exaggerating the threat? I’m sure the astronomer royal could confirm that the planet itself has had worse headaches than us in its 4.5 billion years. We’re a mosquito it’s about to swat.
The Bright Side of a Hot Planet
Some scientists try to combat the numbing effects of alarm by emphasizing the positive. For example, in April scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research reached the alarming conclusion that the world’s nations have to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 70 percent in this century to avoid catastrophe, a word that includes scenarios such as the sea level rising enough to inundate cities, the disappearance of critical links in the food chain, the weather unleashing extremes the likes of which we have only begun to witness. But in their press release to the warming world, the scientists struck an optimistic tone:
The threat of global warming can still be greatly diminished if nations cut emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases by 70 percent this century, according to a new analysis…. ‘This research indicates that we can no longer avoid significant warming during this century,’ says NCAR scientist Warren Washington, the lead author. ‘But if the world were to implement this level of emission cuts, we could stabilize the threat of climate change and avoid catastrophe.'”
Oh cool. Seventy percent? No problem.
Let’s not think too hard about the likelihood that humans will reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 70 percent in this century. We did stop eroding the ozone layer, but for the most part we’ve shown the foresight of a fungus spreading across the surface of a peach. When the peach goes, we go.
At times like these, there’s always poetry. Here’s Robinson Jeffers in 1954 fretting about the houses being built on Carmel Point. Does the Point care, he asks?
Not faintly. It has all time. It knows that the people are a tide
that swells and in time will ebb, and all
their works dissolve. Meanwhile the image of the pristine beauty
Lives in the very grain of the granite,
Safe as the endless ocean that climbs our cliff.